


Eat. Sleep. Don't Stop Til You Drop.

by pinchess07



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Fluff and Angst, Graves Lives, Humor, M/M, Newt has a vague illness, Or maybe wizards don't know anemia? Idk, Overprotective Theseus, Theseus is the best bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-29
Updated: 2016-12-29
Packaged: 2018-09-13 04:13:26
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9106198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pinchess07/pseuds/pinchess07
Summary: For a prompt at the km:So Newt is usually a bundle of energy, constantly in motion. He doesn't need to sleep a lot and eats little (which is a constant worry to the Goldstein sisters and Jacob). It usually doesn't faze Newt because he is used to survive on little but ever since childhood he crashes every once in a while and when he crashes he crashes hard. Near comatose for days, little to no energy, nosebleeds and inexplainable bruises. His family never could find out what was wrong with him even after they took him to the best mediwitches and mediwizards around the world. Newt keeps being okay after a few days of rest, so they made sure that Newt would stay with Theseus whenever he starts to show first symptoms (nosebleeds, the odd bruise here and there).After the movie:Newt hasn't taken a break in weeks.  He doesn't immediately notice that he's due for another crash and when he finally realises either during an auror meeting or maybe during a stake out for poachers, it's far too late to warn anyone. He freaks everyone out by suddenly collapsing like a puppet with cut strings.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Not beta'ed.

He sleeps regularly, but only for four hours, before he's up again. He eats regularly too, although just small bites from a sandwich here and there. He's always fastidious about the time, like how a werewolf would keep track of the moon phases.   
  
It's the way he's always been, as far back as he could remember. Barely eating, barely sleeping. His parents say he's a bundle of energy from the time he's born.   
  
But one day, there's a drip of something wet from his nose. Newt wipes at it with his tiny hand. It's a fascinating color, really. The color of the skin of the apple he ate that morning.   
  
_Was it a special apple? Was that why it's melting out of his nose?_  
  
He toddles over to Theseus. His big brother would know. He knows everything.  
  
Theseus screams for Mother and Father the instant he sees Newt bleeding out.   
  
It's the first, but not the last.   
  
There's only one other symptom that Newt notices: the colors. They're inexplicable, but very entertaining for Newt as a kid.  
  
"My arm's turning different colors, Theseus!" He shouts gleefully, when he's just turned six. "There's blue, and green, and yellow!"  
  
"What? Lemme see!" Theseus panics. He's turned into a mother hen ever since Newt had the first nosebleed at four years old. Newt stretches out his left arm. Indeed, Newt's skin is a motley patchwork of color under his freckles.   
  
"Does it hurt?" Theseus demands worriedly. Newt shakes his head, and Theseus sighs in relief.  
  
The next morning when Newt showers, he notices there's another patch of color on his chest.  
  
He hurries to put his pants on, then races to his brother's room without a shirt.  
  
"Theseus! There's more on my chest, look!" Newt shouts excitedly. Theseus startles awake, and he's just about to berate his brother for being so noisy so early in the morning when Newt's eyes roll to the back of his head.   
  
Theseus screams bloody murder while cradling Newt's unconscious body.  
  
Newt doesn't wake for a week and a half. when he comes to, he's in an unfamiliar bed, in a room that smells really weird.  
  
His mother is in a chair by his bedside, reading a story to Theseus in her lap.  
  
"Mother? Theseus...?" he croaks. They both startle. Theseus bawls, snot dripping from his nose, as he says he thought Newt had died.   
  
\--  
  
His healers in St. Mungo's find nothing wrong with him, and he's discharged in the same afternoon.  
  
\--  
  
And so it goes. It happens over and over, several times a year. Their father scours the world for the best mediwitches and mediwizards to check on Newt. They give him the same diagnosis every time: that he's _fine._  
  
He's obviously not, so his parents keep looking for other healers. By the time he's eight, he's sick and tired of hospitals and healers.   
  
He sneaks out in the night to their hippogriff stable. The beta of the pack, Artemis, takes him under her wing.   
  
Theseus shouts at him in the morning, and he shouts back, demanding freedom.   
  
He doesn't want to stay in hospitals for the rest of his life. He threatens to escape on Artemis' back.  
  
"She'd do it if I asked, Theseus! You know she will!" He cries, so very frustrated with his situation.   
  
"Newt, love, we're just worried about you..." His mother implores him, standing at the entrance of the stable from where she'd followed Theseus. Their father is right behind her.  
  
"I'm not sick all the time! And when I am, I can stay home, you know I can, the healers never know what's wrong with me anyway," Newt pleads.   
  
"And what if your illness worsens? Would you worry your mother and brother even more than you already have?" His father asks, wrapping an arm around his mother.  
  
Newt bows his head. "I apologize. But, if I promise to stay in bed the day before I have an _episode_ , would you consider it?"  
  
He's borrowing grownup words, all in the hope of being listened to.  
  
"You know when it's gonna happen?" Theseus demands.  
  
"The colors generally appear a day or two before it happens," Newt admits. He glances at his parents. His mother looks torn, but his father appears to be taking him seriously.  
  
"You'll stay in bed the moment you notice the colors," his father declares, mind made up. Newt nods.   
  
It's a little victory.   
  
\--  
  
The less said about his time in Hogwarts, the better.   
  
There's so much to do, such a large forest to explore. He expends so much energy, and winds up in the hospital wing what feels like every three weeks.   
  
~~He makes one human friend~~  
  
He finds his limits. He learns to keep track of the amount of food he eats, learns he needs to eat something every three hours for maximum efficiency.  
  
He learns he can only stay in bed for four hours before automatically waking up.  
  
By his seventh year at Hogwarts, he's only in the hospital wing every other month.   
  
~~He's framed for an incident with a jarvey~~  
  
He's so glad to leave.   
  
\--  
  
He lives his life in a strict timetable, trying to delay the inevitable crash that he spends at Theseus' flat. That's his compromise with Theseus, in exchange for his brother letting him travel the world.  
  
Sometimes he manages for up to four months, even reaching six months that one time.  But one memorable occasion, he portkeys to Theseus' flat not two weeks after he was last there.   
  
He's just finished settling the last graphorns in the world in his case, after doing everything he can to outsmart the group of poachers after it.  
  
His whole torso is a canvas full of colors and his nose hasn't stopped bleeding for twenty minutes.   
  
He sleeps like the dead for two weeks. He knows Theseus doesn't understand, but for Newt, the graphorns were worth it.  
  
\--  
  
"Hey, Newtie!"   
  
An arm hooks around his shoulder.   
  
"Please don't call me that, Daniel," Newt pleads. They walk together to the direction of the Auror office in MACUSA.   
  
"Never again, Newtie, I promise," Daniel responds solemnly. He's a blond, overly-friendly Auror with the disposition of a ten-year-old kid.  
  
Newt sighs. Another Auror greets them by the door of the office.  
  
"Newt! There you are! How's my lovely Miss Queenie this morning? I know you've seen her, you've got that Kowalski pastry bag in your hand!" Morgan eagerly asks. Newt is reminded of an over-enthusiastic crup whenever he looks at Morgan, and today is no different.  
  
"Um, she's still lovely. And she's still not yours," Newt says apologetically.  
  
Morgan places a hand over his heart as though Newt hexed him. "You wound me deeply, Scamander! Such harsh words!"  
  
"Alright, alright, sit down, Morgan! The rest of us don't want to waste daylight!" Tina barks from her desk, before turning and smiling to Newt. "Newt, good morning!"  
  
"Good morning, Tina," Newt beams, before heading to Mister Graves' desk. "Good morning, Mister Graves."  
  
"Morning, Newt," Mister Graves says, looking up from the file he was studying.  
  
Newt offers him the Kowalski pastry bag. "Queenie got me too much, so please have some."  
  
Percival Graves feels rather like he's falling deeper and deeper into Newt Scamander's trap every time he accepts Newt's offer.   
  
It doesn't help that the niffler cream puff is _divine._  
  
His only consolation is that Newt probably doesn't know he's doing anything wrong.   
  
He is so, _so weak_ to Newt's hopeful smile and earnest expression. He bites the head of the niffler cream puff with extra viciousness.   
  
He notices Warrington, the old coot, smirking at him and wriggling a bushy eyebrow. Percival glares at him. If Warrington wasn't a _useful_ old coot, Percival would have removed him from the team a long time ago.  
  
Pity Warrington had been on a mission overseas at the time Grindelwald was in Percival's place. Percival's sure he'd have noticed the impostor. He has a gut feeling that Grindelwald planned it that way, along with Goldstein's demotion.  
  
Newt's already moved on to offer the rest of the pastries to the team by the time Percival looks back at him. He notes that Newt doesn't leave any for himself and thinks about offering to share the rest of his niffler cream puff. Then he imagines Warrington's reaction and keeps his niffler cream puff to himself.   
  
He'll really regret it later.   
  
\--  
  
They're working together with Newt to take down a notorious thunderbird poaching operation. Newt's tangled with them before, when he rescued Frank.   
  
The investigation's been going on for three weeks, and they're really close to catching the poachers.   
  
They're staking out a place on the corner of 6th and 48th in the cover of darkness. The team is scattered around the place strategically. Percival is crouched and disillusioned in an alley. Newt is across him, disillusioned as well, only noticeable when his outline blurs with movement.  
  
Newt wipes his nose, the movement catching Percival's attention.   
  
"Caught a cold?" he asks.   
  
"What? Oh, um, yes...?" Newt stammers.  
  
"Have some PepperUp in the morni--"  
  
Percival scrambles up in alarm as Newt's outline drops unceremoniously into the ground. He searches their surroundings, but there's no one else around them. They haven't been ambushed.  
  
When Percival heaves Newt into his arms and ends the Disillusionment Charm, he discovers that Newt's suffering from a nosebleed, instead of the cold that Percival had thought.  
  
He conjures a stretcher and runs to Goldstein's position, asking her to take over, disapparating to the nearest hospital before she could say a single word.  
  
\--  
  
The healers at St. Augustus' are thoroughly unhelpful.   
  
"He's fine," they say. "Just sleeping. He's been here before. His particular case is well-documented. We don't know what he's got, but it's non-lethal, non-transferable."  
  
\--  
  
Newt's private room turns into an Auror hangout after shifts.  
  
"--should have seen it, man! I was so awesome, the bastard didn't even notice me when I was standing right behind him, he went down like--" Daniel yammers on.  
  
"What? You're a filthy lying liar who lies, Daniel, I was the one who--" Morgan contradicts, and the two of them continue bickering loudly, while Warrington just shakes his head in exasperation.  
  
Percival doesn't have the heart to discourage his people from reporting to Newt about the poachers they've caught.   
  
Kowalski, Queenie Goldstein's ~~secret~~ No-Maj, even comes by every other day, bringing huge baskets of delicious, beast-inspired pastries.  
  
He's very friendly to Pickett and the niffler, both of whom had set up camp in Newt's bed, the niffler by Newt's feet and Pickett by Newt's shoulder.  
  
It's obvious that he's seen and interacted with them before. Percival doesn't dare say a word lest Kowalski stop bringing nourishment.   
  
He's blatantly ignoring the law. That never would have happened if Newt hadn't bribed him with niffler cream puffs in the first place.  
  
He's also keeping quiet about the _very_ illegal case of beasts that the Goldstein sisters are looking after. His whole team is, in fact.  
  
He's got a feeling that the longer he associates with Newt, the more laws he'll be bending or ignoring. As long as Newt wakes up soon, he'll probably do it with a smile.   
  
\--  
  
Theseus Scamander arrives without any pomp or warning.   
  
"Healer Orphelia notified me. I've actually got a Newt alert protocol in most major hospitals," Theseus explains. "How long hasn't he been eating properly?"  
  
"How are we supposed to know?" Morgan asks him back. Theseus gives him a very potent stink-eye.   
  
"I thought MACUSA would've at least learned to take care of their employees by now, consultant or not. Newt has to eat something every three hours. At least he has been sleeping, from what you've told me, or else he would've crashed much sooner."  
  
"I'll keep a closer look in the future," Percival promises solemnly in the face of Theseus'  ire.  
  
\--  
  
"Hey, little brother," Theseus says. "You haven't done this in what, two years? I thought I've broken you of this habit of exhausting yourself to the limit."  
  
"Bugger off, Theseus," Newt groans and opens his eyes groggily. "Why am I in the hospital?"  
  
"It's no one's fault but your own. You didn't tell anyone here of your condition," Theseus reminds him.  
  
" _Merlin._ "  
  
Theseus laughs. "They're planning a welcome back party. Why've you got to go and charm the whole Auror department of MACUSA? The Auror department back home is just as--"  
  
Newt throws a pillow at him.   
  
"And that Graves fellow, he seems especially smitten--"  
  
Newt stuffs his fingers in his ears and starts humming, long used to his brother's teasing.  
  
\--  
  
The timetable of his life changes. Queenie and Jacob firmly tells him that he'll be spending breakfast at the bakery, and they won't let him leave until he eats at least one pastry.   
  
Tina hands him a fruit as soon as he steps into MACUSA.   
  
Morgan and Daniel make sure to drag him to lunch.   
  
Warrington brings him a sandwich prepared by his granddaughter.  
  
Percival takes him home for dinner.   
  
"I'm an accomplished cook, Newt. I don't mind cooking for two people, and this way I can be sure you ate something." There's this glint in his eyes.  
  
"Um..."  
  
"I insist."  
  
Newt has the feeling that this is all his brother's fault.   
  
~~It totally is.~~

**Author's Note:**

> something kinda different. Is it too OOC? I'd love to know what you think!


End file.
